Our discussion in class about elite universities with swimming requirements instituted by wealthy benefactors reminded me of this NY Times article I read last spring. It makes an interesting point: as government funding for science has declined (especially in the wake of the financial crisis), extremely wealthy philanthropists, such as Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, and Lawrence Ellison, have donated millions to fill the gap. The funding serves as a major accelerator for research, funding ventures that the federal government may deem too risky and pharmaceutical companies may deem too unprofitable. However, this has created funding biases, with funding generally going to wealthy institutions at the expense of poor ones, and to topics the donors find personally important or interesting rather than a broad spectrum of research areas.
One of the areas that has seen several drastic disparities in funding is disease research. Most of the money philanthropists have donated went to funding research to find cures for diseases that had personally affected them or their families. For example, Tom and Ginny Hughes donated millions to the cystic fibrosis foundation because they have two daughters with the disease. However, funding from philanthropists have disproportionately gone toward diseases that disproportionately affect white people, such as ovarian cancer or melanoma, although some campaigns, like that for prostate cancer, has benefited many across racial divides. However others, such as sickle-cell anemia, have largely been ignored by donors.
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